Journal Daniel Dvorkin's Journal: I'm not sure if Betteridge's law applies here or not. 2
Privacy and the Internet: Is Facebook Evil?
He's right that privacy in the modern sense is a new development--for most of human history, people lived with what we would now consider a near-total lack of privacy--but wrong, I think, to dismiss it on that basis. There are many, many modern ideas, such as democracy and equality before the law, that would have made no sense whatsoever to our ancestors; does that mean they're any less worth prizing?
Obviously I'm not particularly concerned about giving up my privacy by maintaining an online presence, else I wouldn't be posting this. But the combination of a traditional "village" level of everyone knowing everyone else's business with the speed and ubiquity of modern communications represents a third phase in humanity's development as far as privacy is concerned--the first having been the intensely linked small communities of nomads and peasants, the second having been the mass anonymity of the industrial age--and I don't think we have any idea how that's going to shake out yet.
Betteridge (Score:2)
It isn't a law like the laws of thermodynamics, it's more like a law making a 70 mph speed limit. Betteridge even broke his own "law".
Re: (Score:2)
True enough. Hell, it's not even a law like Poe's Law, which may not be quite thermodynamic in its consistency, but certainly comes close--I can't remember the last time I saw an effective satire of extremist wackiness that didn't manage to get taken seriously by somebody. The Mother Of All Internet Laws, of course, is no longer as reliable as it once was simply because people are aware of it, and will go to sometimes absurd lengths to avoid Nazi references even when they're appropriate to the conversatio